Thursday, March 22, 2012

MIT Camera Culture group published a paper proposing a way to see around the corners. MIT 3D range camera is said to be able to look around a corner using diffusely reflected light that achieves sub-millimetre depth precision and centimeter lateral precision. Youtube video shows its principle:

For example: the second in line is entrusted with the mission to carry a shining metallic plate near the bad guy. While he holds the gizmo nervously (slightly angled), the hero scans the bad guy with his cool red laser. While the image processing kernels are busy crunching the numbers, our unfortunate second guy takes a bullet and becomes the anticipated martyr (include some watery eyes and melodrama). The hero jumps into action, armed with the exact shape profile of the bad guy, and uses his Remington Magnum to hit exactly at the spot which will send the bad guy through the time warp to another dimension..or whatever you think is a good ending ;) Now you know!

Let's hope this is happening at night or in a dark room, otherwise the hero needs to wear thick glasses with narrow passband to filter out background illumination. Let's hope the bad guy is not wearing black clothes or smart enough to figure out why the heck a shining metal plate suddenly appears and moves towards him.

Seriously, this idea is similar to light-sectioning for 3D imaging. People in the image sensor community already did this many times. I just don't see the technical contribution of this paper.